NASA Announced Plans to Land on the Moon

On Friday, Oct. 25th, NASA announced that they are planning on sending a rover to the moon. The rover will work on the moon for a couple of years until NASA sends people up after it.

The rover, called VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover), is currently being designed at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be launched from the Space Coast around the KSC. It will criss-cross all across the moon in search of water. The Viper will specifically search the south pole, where water ice has already been detected.

Jim Bridenstine, Administrator of NASA, is the one who announced the mission.

“Viper is gonna rove on the south pole of the moon, and VIPER is going to assess where the water ice is,” he said. The funny thing is that, even though VIPER is a rover, it won’t actually be “roving,” which means “to wander aimlessly, without a definite destination.”

In reality, VIPER isn’t wandering aimlessly, it’s systematically looking. It does have a destination: ice.

Though there is no set launch date yet, NASA is planning on launching the rover in December of 2022. This is about two years before they are planning on sending the crewed Artemis mission.

Brindenstine also announced on Friday the moon landing effort could involve the SpaceX Starship. The Starship, owned by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, is currently under development at two different sites, one in Florida and one in Texas. It is a 100-passenger spaceship that, assuming it manages to get off the ground, could carry people as well as cargo. Musk has expressed plans to get the Starship to the moon before 2022.

“We want to go to the moon with commercial landers, and Starship is a commercial lander that we anticipate will be competing in this program,” Brindenstine elaborated. 

What he means by this is that Starship will likely be a candidate to land equipment, fuel, and supplies before the astronauts get there. NASA is planning on sending two ships of just supplies and equipment before they send any astronauts aboard the Artemis 3 and about once a year thereafter. These people will need supplies and resources, and if Musk is planning on going to the moon anyway, why not look into using the Starship as a delivery ship?

We found ice in the south pole of the moon in 2009. This was a big moment for us, as the presence of water on other bodies means there’s a chance of life– at least as we know it. More than that, it means that there’s a chance that we might be able to survive there, should we ever colonize extraterrestrial bodies (which inevitably must be done if we wish to preserve our species longer than our planet can maintain and survive).

Daniel Andrews, VIPER project manager, explained why water is so important, “The key to living on the Moon is water — the same as here on Earth… the question now is if the Moon could really contain the amount of resources we need to live off-world. This rover will help us answer the many questions we have about where the water is, and how much there is for us to use.”